


A Brief History

by Potterology



Series: The Secret Life of Soldiers [1]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Family, Gen, History, gen - Freeform, pasts, relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-16
Updated: 2012-12-16
Packaged: 2017-11-21 06:04:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/594301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Potterology/pseuds/Potterology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her first cigarette, she steals from Mark. It's menthol and tastes horrible and she hacks up a lung after one draw, but she smokes the whole thing and the next day goes and buys a pack of Marlboro lights (because she had heard from Margo Anthony in second period that they were the best kind).</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brief History

Her first cigarette, she steals from Mark. It's menthol and tastes horrible and she hacks up a lung after one draw, but she smokes the whole thing and the next day goes and buys a pack of Marlboro lights (because she had heard from Margo Anthony in second period that they were the best kind). Lunches from then onwards are spent in the back alley behind the dumpsters, where the janitors used to smoke weed before random drum testing became mandatory, and it’s usually with Bobby Carmichael. 

Later, at a drive in movie theatre, she lets him get to second base, his tongue halfway down her throat, and then subsequently decides to quit smoking. Her mouth always felt fuzzy afterward anyway. But that's her freshman year and she doesn't yet realize just how smart she is, so she tries to be cool first. It works, for a while. 

Her cover is blown three weeks before the school breaks for Christmas her sophomore year, and it is entirely her brother’s fault. 

Somewhere between English and Calculus, he brags that his little sister does all his homework for him - and aces it. News spreads and she is suddenly open for business, and everybody knows. Her smoking days well and truly behind her, she doesn't mind the positive attention, but things take a fairly piss poor turn near the end of the semester when the quarterback of the all state championship football team and senior to boot, James K. Porter (JP for short), asks her for help in fifth period physics and then asks her to lunch. Sam knows - knows - that he's dating Marina Simmons, she had to hear about it every last period Calculus, but the girly high school teenager part of her brain won't stop screaming long enough for rational thought to make itself heard. So she gushingly accepts, trying to play it cool. 

She winds up taped to the flagpole, pizza toppings rapidly cooling in her hair, like a scene from some B-movie rip off of Carrie. In the principals office afterwards, she cannot meet her father’s hard stare. 

Her mother dies the following year. The doctors blame it on depression; intellectually, Sam knows that it's a lack of serotonin, that it's more than just feeling sad, but there's a snide voice in the back of her brain that lashes out and calls her mother a selfish human being, that there was more she could have done to stop herself. Mark blames The General. 

They move to Colorado and Mark gets a tattoo. Sam does not get a tattoo, but she does get a job at a mechanics shop a few blocks from her new school, and fairly quickly she's the best mechanic they have. She can strip a Junker faster than they can change a tire; they time her during one particularly slow day, and she goes home a hundred dollars heavier. They let her drive the tow truck. When she turns sixteen, they give her a destroyed old Indian and dare her to rebuild it. 

On the back of that bike, she drives her way to the Air Force recruitment office to sign the papers. She will never forget the almost teary expression on her fathers face when she told him she wanted to join - and the angry, betrayed look on Mark’s, because they promised each other that this was not the life they wanted, that they would be more than their parents expectations, that they owed it to their mother. 

At 20, she is raped. And she doesn't tell anyone. 

The first plane she flies has an engine failure mid-flight and things get hairy enough for her to blank on protocol and do whatever she damn well can in order to prevent the fucking thing from crashing. Those are the words she uses when her CO demands to know what the hell she thought she was doing. 

He dresses her down to a platoon of snickering wannabes, but in the end it's her, and only her, that passes the flight test. 

Her father visits her a few months later - well, technically he's visiting the base, she just happens to be there, but it's nice to pretend - and he launches into a diatribe, telling her it was a stupid and risky move and she should have kept to procedure. She expects a compliment at the end, something akin to “atta girl”, but it never comes, just a stern dismissal, “Lieutenant”, which she follows with a perfect about-face salute, “General”. He conducts a drill the next day, in the pouring rain, and even though everybody knows she’s his kid, he gets her down in the mud for two hundred push-ups. 

Mark and Jacob have a fight. A big one. He's getting married, Jacob says he's too young, thinks he should wait, have a career first, look at Sam, she's doing something with her life, don't throw it away on some girl you barely know. Somehow they drag her ass backwards into it, then it comes back to their mother and how the General was never there, and what the hell would he know about marriage. Sam tries to mediate as best she can. 

Things go frosty fairly quick between her and Mark, when a hurried phone call ends up in: "Stop making excuses for him”, "I'm not, I just think he thinks he's doing what's best."

So Jacob disappears from her life, Mark soon after because he thinks she’s taking sides. She'd take up smoking again if it didn't remind her of Bobby Carmichael's cold hands. 

Now, flying comes naturally; killing does not. The first man to die by her hand is a civilian, someone whose name she would never know, face she would never see, and somehow knowing that makes the guilt that much stronger. If a tree falls, and all that crap. She cries to herself as quietly as possible, her face pressed into the overly starched case of her pillow. For the first time, if anyone actually heard her, they don’t let on. Perhaps they know the feeling, or maybe they just don’t want her to know they understand. 

She calls Mark from a beaten old pay phone after a year, but he doesn't answer and she resorts to loitering in his voicemail for a minute and a half, mumbling useless analogies and wishing she was someone else. He doesn't return the call, but he doesn't return the Christmas card she sends, so that's something. 

It’s three years later - the ice is barely starting to melt between her and her father - and he is visiting the base (she’s grown up enough to know that it isn’t her that draws him there, but the new F-15). She tells him she has news. 

(She’s also a Captain, but he just mutters that he was a Major by her age.)

There is a moment of silence between them, her and the General, in which she knows - knows, like she knows the laws of gravity and centrifugal force - that he is disappointed in her. He wants her to go to NASA. He wants her to be an astronaut, to shoot (literally) for the stars. So an underground, classified research project on deep space radar telemetry is about as far from that as she can get in his mind. Mistakenly, he thinks she's taking the job because she's scared. He obviously doesn't know what it really entails, but in his head it involves a desk and a lot of paperwork and busywork and work that is generally Very Unimportant, so he asks her, quietly, over his steak and wine, "when did you become a coward?" and then walks out of the restaurant, leaving her alone with a fifty dollar bill and a heavy heart. 

They stop speaking, things freezing over for good, it seems. Mark just tells her "I told you so."

She isn't allowed to go on the maiden voyage. Daniel Jackson is the new wunderkind and she is ferried off to the Gulf. It is the first time and the closest she's come to leaving the Air Force. 

But a year later she is introduced to the Colonel and SG-1, and things aren’t so bad.


End file.
